Dawn burns red over the port of Malaga as I pace the decks of a gleaming ocean giant. This early morning constitutional is a daily event on the Seven Seas Explorer, and today several people join me as the town beyond emerges in the blinding Spanish light.
The Seven Seas Explorer doesn’t sell itself as a wellness vessel (it’s no floating sanatorium), and many of the 750 passengers on board will barely register that there is a gym on board, or classes in Pilates and yoga — but there is plenty of this kind of thing on offer on the ship, which has been referred to as “the most luxurious on the seas”.
Real Picassos and Chagalls stud the restaurant walls. The spa is lined with mother of pearl. Corridors of cabins (their bathrooms fashioned out of marble the colour of clotted cream) are dotted with gentians and bird of paradise flowers.
On the one hand the ship feels like a place for indulging — waiters patrol sunloungers with iced champagne all day long, serving soft-shell crab and sushi. Yet on the other hand the highest-tech gym imaginable sits at the prow of the ship, set against glass windows that make you feel as though you’re cycling or running in the air.
Never in all my years on a treadmill have I met an instructor as tactful as the Brazilian Ademir. Scanning the results of my body composition analysis (the ship is equipped with all the latest gadgets), making sense of my parlous water-to-muscle ratio, he looks at me with sincerity and starts: “Don’t be offended, but . . .” We tour the machines in the gym and he stops to give advice to the passengers who are getting stuck in to their workouts. Others peel off to use the infrared sauna in the spa (it uses light to heat the skin tissue, perfect for strained muscles) followed by three minutes in the ice room (this improves oxygen supply to muscle tissue and the brain), which is only a few steps away from a warm, saltwater plunge pool.
Advertisement
Because the passenger numbers on the Seven Seas Explorer are kept deliberately low (it feels as though thousands more people could be accommodated), the sauna, spa and gym are quiet and relaxed. No queues, no clatter. The companionable hush is comparable perhaps to that in the ship’s library, its wood and leather interior lined with immense Taschen reference books.
The tempo moves up a few notches at night. The ship’s restaurants resonate with laughter. In the hair salon the last few customers dawdle before a late dinner, letting stylists go mad with the hairspray. One of the bars vibrates with a live Dixieland jazz band that in an encore goes off-piste and bubbles into a version of John Coltrane’s The Night Has a Thousand Eyes while the audience stamp their feet with enthusiasm.
But always the next morning they head off for that sunrise constitutional — seven laps around the upper deck constitutes a mile — led by Ademir, who explains that fitness activities on cruises are no longer just Zumba and aerobics and slogging it out on exercise bikes. There’s no binge-purge routine here, frantically sweating out the steaks and cocktails of the night before.
A number of people will disembark having spent a few days in close consultation with a personal trainer, fashioning a workable programme for the months ahead and taking advantage of the acres of healthier food (grilled flounder, iced soups, fresh lobster, bream rubbed with mint) in any one of the restaurants. In far better shape, in short, than when they got on board.
A ten-day Barcelona to Rome cruise on the Seven Seas Explorer (rssc.com) costs from £5,379, including flights, shore excursions, drinks, meals and use of the gym and spa. Canyon Ranch treatments and personal training cost extra